Moonlighting at GMH questioned

Employees at Guam Memorial Hospital can work outside jobs, but hospital policy limits the amount and type of work they can do.

The hospital isn't keeping track of moonlighting employees, according to the Office of Public Accountability, which this week issued an audit report examining the hospital's compensation policies.

If the hospital isn't keeping an eye on its moonlighting employees and the additional hours they put in, it raises concerns about the safety of those employees as well as the patients they care for, said Clariza Roque, a staffer at the Office of Public Accountability, who helped prepare the audit.

As part of its audit, the Accountability Office took a closer look at the compensation history of several employees, including an employee who had been working a full-time job in addition to his hospital job, Roque said.

According to hospital policy, the hospital job is an employee's first priority and outside employment can't exceed 50 percent of his or her hospital work schedule. That means a hospital employee who works 40 hours a week at the facility can't work more than 20 hours at an outside job. The hospital, for safety reasons, also prohibits employees from working more than 16 hours in a 24-hour period.

"There wasn't any annual approval since 2007 for this employee, which is why we brought it up (in the audit)," Roque said.

The audit report also noted excessive compensation for many hospital employees.

There are more than a dozen ways for hospital employees -- especially nurses -- to get extra pay, including working on weekends, working nights, being on call and being certified.

On a scale of one to 10, with one being simple and 10 being complicated, the hospital's current payroll system is "about a seven,"said hospital payroll supervisor Mary Ann Palomo.

The payroll system is automated "for the most part," she said, but there are still several adjustments that are performed manually "because of the extra pay."

And at the end of the process someone needs to manually review the payroll printouts to ensure government compensation rules aren't being broken, such as limits on the amount of different types of leave an employee can claim within a year, she said.

The more steps that are performed manually, the greater chance of mistakes being made, Palomo said.

The audit report noted that many of the hospital's highest-paid employees were being paid much more than their base pay, including two radiologists who tripled their base pay in a year.

The public auditor recommended the hospital change its payroll system to automatically calculate the different types of pay. It also recommended a review process for employees who are being paid significantly more than their base salary.

The hospital should create a committee to recommend improvements to its compensation system, the auditor recommended, including whether it needs 44 different pay codes.

There actually are 47 different pay codes, according to the hospital, and Palomo said most of the codes are related to the different types of leave for employees, such as maternity leave, military leave, jury duty, administrative leave and workers compensation.

And because physicians are paid several different rates when they're on call, each of those rates has a different pay code.

Incentive pay

Jun Infante , the hospital's acting chief financial officer, said the hospital added several different types of incentive pay over the years to compensate for low starting salaries for nurses.

The pay issue could be simplified by incorporating the additional compensation into their base pay, he said.

According to the report, a nurse during the first payday of 2010 earned more than three times the normal base pay, through a combination of overtime, holiday pay and several different types of incentive pay.

At $35.37 an hour, the nurse would have been paid $2,829 during a normal pay period, but the hospital paid $8,830.

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

Email this article

Moonlighting at GMH questioned

Employees at Guam Memorial Hospital can work outside jobs, but hospital policy limits the amount and type of work they can do.The hospital isn't keeping track of moonlighting employees, according to